Question on Target of Revenge (possible spoilers)

Was the Target of Revenge reputation and resulting encounter originally planned by the developers or was it something added by Co8? It was a fun encounter for the record.

 

Added by Livonya a year ago.

 

All hail the glorious Livonya. :notworthy

 

You are gonna hate me for this.

Now after fighting both the Revenge party and another certain party in Homlett I found the "certain other party" to be much tougher. I'm likely to take heat from the modders here but I hope my humble observation is taken as just that. A big downfall I saw with the Revenge party was the 4 thugs dependant on heavy two-handed weapons. After killing them and going through their inventories I found that perhaps 3 of them had single hand weapons and large masterwork shields in addition to all other weapons.
Checking in the ego section under kills I saw that they had an ac of 17 without their shields. As with any of the aggressor parties the mage seems to fall first ( my fireball w/ a holy smite chaser seems to be the bane of most other spell-casters.)
The party I used was 8th level at the time it faced both parties. I have this thing called 'Adventurer's ADD. I tend to jump from quest to quest and start them but don't immediately finish them (in the case of the longer quests.) After dealing with Ranno's and Gremag at 6th level I spent quite a bit of time in the temple (rescuing Prince Thrommel and freeing the Elven noble and her party in the same session.) By the time I got back out my party was 8th level. I fought and defeated the Revenge party, went back into the temple where I freed the husband and wife who had the last ingredient I needed to finish the DH quest. For the record I seem to still have the glitch where the woman from Hommlet was taken with the caravan and she makes no mention of any part to do with the DH quest so I have to console that ingredient in. I know I've jumped off topic a bit but I figured it would be best to give a bit of information on the party used. I mean no disrespect to Livonya or any other modder here. You've all done great work keeping a game alive that the company that created it pretty much left for dead.

Peace (until the next war)

 

What are you saying could be changed to make the encounter better? The choice of weapons for the thugs?

 

My take on what he's trying to say is that the attackers used two-handed weapons and an AC of 17 when they would have been better off attacking with the one-handed weapons and shields to improve their AC's to 19+ and thus making the encounter more difficult.

 

I read it like that but just wanted to be sure. It's a very tough encounter unless you leave it (accidentally or not) until you've got a lot more levels. I usually come to it around level 4 or 5 .

Wouldn't reducing the damage dealt by the thugs be counter-productive though? I've found that it's getting close enough to hit them is a big part of the problem and it would be far easier to 'mob' them if you don't have to worry about a huge AoO range.

 

@Zebedee

Yes, I agree. I always hit them right after Lareth and his goonies. I find the encounter plenty difficult with the 4th-5th level characters that I end up having at that point. I'm all for leaving the encounter as it stands.

 

Most recent runthrough (first with co8 5, of course), I had a hell of a time with this encounter with a 6th level party (of 5); the assassin in the corner made it hell. I don't remember that assassin being there in 4.0 (I think you still met him/her elsewhere)--am I misremembering?

Anyway, with the assassin, I found this battle easily the hardest of the game. My question is, who put the assassin there? Was that Livonya, or someone after her?

 

The assassin can be there pre-Co8 v5. It should be related to how you handle the questline.

 

Thin Ice

As I was asked I will answer.
The use of the four thug's shields would raise their ac to 19 making them not so easy to hit (not that they are all that easy in the first place.) They each strike twice a round so they are at least 6th level. The weapons they are using are masterwork Items (I believe they were morningstars). For fighter-types in your party that can be tougher. Granted I'm using a 7 member party (Serena had not been added yet for the revenge fight but she was present during "that other fight." so there were eight characters in my party at that point.
The party I use consists of:
An Elven Fighter
An Elven Cleric
A human barbarian (set up on bastard sword, this is the intended recipient of Scather)
A human ranger (two-weapon style wielding dwarven war axe and hand axe)
A half-elven archer (masterwork mighty composite longbow(18 str), and frostbrand)
A human rogue (treated as a sniper given a longbow, point blank shot, and precise shot)
A human wizard
NPC- Serena rogue 3/fighter 2 currantly (+2 longsword and that Lolo's Joy crossbow.)

I haven't upgraded to Co8 v5 yet so I knew nothing about the assassin added to that party.

I'm not saying change the encounter I'm merely saying there are already existing means of making the thugs stronger (raise in ac by letting them use the shields that exist in their inventory.)

A couple of situations I've encountered within my currant game.
1) In the temple where you run into a group of guards led by a commander in a blue cloak. In that room there appears to be a female bugbear stuck in the wall. She doesn't initiate combat and when caught in a fireball blast is completely unharmed and not even slightly pissed off. Just thought I'd bring that up.

2) I've mentioned this one before but I still get that occasional outdoor encounter with three frogs. Two may be struck normally but the 3rd doesnt seem to be able to move or attack and cannot be attacked or harmed in any way. Only solution was to reload a previously saved game. I would not have mentioned this again but for the fact that this happened yet again but with new creatures. 3 trolls to be exact but in this case all 3 were in that "limbo" area that made it so they couldn't move, attack, or be attacked.

3) SuperTroll -- During one fight with a trio of trolls on the banks of a river the party overcame two of the trolls normally. A third one with 56 hit points had been blasted with an 8th level fireball, a flamestrike, and four arrows (two of the arrows had scored criticals.) The fireblasts had done him in by nearly twenty hit points over his hit point total. by all accounts the troll should have dropped and died. Not so, that troll stood and didn't quit fighting until I did a total of 244 hit points of damage. At which point the computer finally decided that the red-headed step-troll had finally had enough and it died. I know it may sound like BS and I myself couldn't believe what I was seeing. That damn troll wouldn't fall down for the typical Coup De Gras(sp?) its previous two kin had fallen to.

 

Yes, this has been mentioned before. And I replied that I needed to know exactly which map it was. Specifically. Remember, there are two of each type of random encounter maps (scrub, forest, river and swamp), one with a road, and one without. I need to know which one this is happening on, where the party leader started on the map (specific coordinates would be preferable) and approximately where (direction and distance) the monsters were. Also, the survival skill level of everyone in the party would help.

I have never had this problem occur, so I cannot gather this information myself. Until I have it, I cannot even start to fix it without implementing sweeping changes to all the random encounter maps that would most likely break them in other ways.

 

Re: Thin Ice

I've had this once before - the first time I used Livonya's mod. But you are the only other person to have reported it - no-one else could figure out why this was happening as they couldn't reproduce it. I also struggled to reproduce it after the first time it happened.